Germany: Educating Migrants To Cost €3 Billion A Year

Sean Gallup/Getty Images19 Jun 2016

Educating newly arrived migrants is set to cost Germany €3 billion a year, a federal report has estimated.

More than a million migrants entered Germany last year, and as the majority of them are thought to be under 25, educational researcher Kai Maaz says that the reaction to mass migration is first and foremost an educational task, reportedDie Welt.

Researchers estimate that if between 60 and 80 per cent of these newcomers remain in the country, their education will cost Germany up to €3 billion a year.

The National Education Report reports on trends in education and states that the proportion of students with qualifications equivalent to British GCSEs and ‘A’ Levels has risen. It notes that the number of students attending Hauptschule, which are schools for people with poor grades, has decreased since 2006. It expresses concern, however, that foreign students are overrepresented at Hauptschule being among those who leave school with no qualifications.

The report did not compare the educational performance of students with an immigrant background to native German students. Mr. Maaz said such a differentiation is “completely inadequate in an immigration society”.

Education senator Claudia Bogedan of the Social Democratic Party (SPD), however, said the results of students with an immigrant background were worse. She blamed the achievement gap between the groups on socio-economic status, saying it would be eliminated with “the reduction of social inequality”.

Ms. Bogedan’s assessment runs contrary to that of Professor Heiner Rindermann, chair of Educational and Developmental Psychology at the Technical University of Chemnitz. Mr. Rindermann noted that the capabilities of migrants from the Middle East and Africa, including elite students from the rich Gulf states, are on average more limited. He believes the open-door approach the country took to migration last year will have serious negative repercussions on German society.

Bavaria’s education minister Ludwig Spaenle of the Christian Social Union (CSU) said educating the million new migrants would take a “decade of massive effort”.

Breitbart London last month reported that local authorities in Germany sounded the alarm on a “cost explosion” of unaccompanied migrant minors. They warned that the cost of social care alone for these migrants was estimated to be almost €3 billion to municipal authorities.